Snowflakes
by alanwolfmoon
Summary: it's the winter after amber died, house's power is out, and he's musing in the cold. sad.


Greg sighed, sitting in the cold room of his apartment, the blanket pulled tight around himself.

Another gust of wind rattled through the hundred-year-old windows, he curled a little tighter.

The ice storm had knocked the power out, his fireplace could only do so much, and in a place this old, nothing sealed well against the elements.

You could actually see outside, if you laid on the floor in front of the door, and looked between it and the wooden floorboards.

His leg was a bitch when it was cold, and he didn't particularly like the memories it brought up either.

Memories of curling under a tree so the cold Ohio snow didn't fall directly on him...

He shook his head, clearing the image from his mind.

Great, his brain was an etch-a-sketch.

Another gust of wind, another rush of bad memories.

Appropriate memories, he supposed.

Because again, he was cold because someone was mad at him, had kicked him out.

Except in his memories it had been over the state of his school shirt, and having been kicked out for the night with no dinner.

He hadn't known it back then, but things could be far, far worse than curling up under a tree with his stomach grumbling.

He was used to physical pain, physical discomfort, now.

It was with him every minute, of every day.

The thing that hurt far more, that he had absolutely no defenses against, was the loneliness that threatened to smother him like a snowstorm smothers the noise of the night.

He remembered it being cold, all those years ago, when he had ended up with the warmest woman he had ever met sleeping next to him on the cheep mattress of his first apartment. The electricity had been out that night, too.

He shook his head again, wiping what must have been a stray snowflake that had somehow landed all the way inside, on his cheek, just under his eye.

His leg panged, and his heart constricted in time, as he remembered the first winter after the infarction, when every day he had staggered outside to get the newspaper, and every day he had fallen because he was too stubborn and it hurt so much and he should have still been on crutches.

He curled a little tighter, at the memory of a particularly bad fall, the week after Stacy had left.

He hadn't known how long he had lain there, unable to move.

He remembered his neighbor calling an ambulance, and lying on a hospital bed, as a new doctor, just hired the previous day, in fact, gently stretched out his painful limb, checked the sore, sore muscles and tendons, and looked at him with those liquid brown puppy eyes.

"Dr. House, right? I'm Dr. James Wilson."

"I don't care who you are, just stop being all nice. I fell. I'm fine."

"You're not fine, you can barely sit up. And stop fidgeting with the IV line, it's supposed to give you fluids, not entertainment."

"I don't *need* fluids. I don't *need* to be *here*. All I need is for you to sign that form that tells Dr, Cuddy I can start work tomorrow, as *planned*, and that a little boo-boo isn't going to change anything."

Dr. puppy looked at him, sighing.

"It's not a boo-boo. You sprained your ankle when you fell."

"Wow, no recovering from that!"

Dr. puppy sighed again, still looking fairly amiable.

"Dr. House...." he shook his head, "you're severely dehydrated, your blood pressure is unstable, your blood sugar is low enough that you either have liver failure, or haven't eaten for at least two days."

House looked away.

"If you *don't* let me take care of you, I will tell that to Dr. Cuddy, along with my opinion that you are severely depressed, and possibly unstable."

"I'm not *unstable*!"

"I have no proof of that."

"You don't seriously think--"

Dr. puppy—House decided Dr. annoying was a better name—looked calmly at him.

"That's the deal."

House groaned, dropping his head back into the pillows.

"Fine....."

Wilson smiled, bending an icepack to start the chemical reaction.

House watched those brown puppy eyes, fixed on the new doctor's hands as he carefully wrapped an ace bandage around House's sore ankle, holding the ice pack in place.

House grimaced, kicking it off.

Wilson looked at him, exasperated.

"I don't like cold stuff...." he mumbled, looking away.

Wilson sighed, shook his head, and plopped the ankle onto a pillow, making House grunt with pain.

"Fine. Let it swell up for all I care."

House snorted.

"Some doctor."

"Some patient. You're supposed to let me treat you."

"What, are you geriatrics?"

"Oncology."

"Ugh, even worse!"

Wilson looked at him, supremely unimpressed.

"And you actually expect me to care what you think?"

"Dude, look at what you're wearing. You care what everybody thinks."

"No, actually, I just care what my boss and my non-asshole patients think. The asshole patients I couldn't care less about."

House watched him for a while.

Then he smirked a little to himself.

"Wrap 'er up, jimmy-boy," he said loudly, in an exaggerated texas accent.

Wilson looked at him strangely.

House was grinning.

He smiled a little to himself.

"Alrighty then, stranger."

House laughed, "you're a dork."

"And you're an ass," he said, smiling, "why don't you like cold stuff?"

House shrugged, opening his mouth to brush it off with a lie.

The warm emergency room faded, and he was left sitting on his couch with melted snowflake after melted snowflake trailing down his cheeks.


End file.
